I took a first shot at the topic structure for the forums here. I doubt I've done it correctly for the long term, though. It seemed like I wanted to have a place for people to hang out and discuss things that might be related to Lisp tangentially, announce things, etc.; then have a place to discuss the language itself; then have a place to discuss other resources like editors and books; and finally a place to discuss implementation-specific questions.

Right now, I don't like the fact that there are so many implementation-specific forums, but I didn't feel like I could cut any of them out. What I may do is see what the high runners are going to be (probably SBCL, CMUCL, CLISP, and possibly Allegro and LispWorks), and then cut down the others that are very low traffic and aggregate them into an "Other Implementations" category.

I second Jaqcues suggestion about newbies subforum. Maybe called 'Getting started', it could be for newbie questions as well as general installation issues (asdf-install, does foo work with bar, where to get baz...)

I also don't think fragmenting the forums to several implementation specific subforums is a good idea. Maybe consider dividing this up with CL, Scheme, and Other Lisps plus some cross implementation, genre specific subforums (Web development, GUIs etc.)

Edit: Oh, and maybe rename the Books section to Books and Resources, it could be useful for posting information about all kinds of lisp related learning resources, including papers and videos etc.

1. Other editors I'll think about. I'm not trying to give anybody and everybody a place to ask editor questions, however. The main goal for the Emacs and VI forums is to collect the various questions about SLIME and Limp. If your editor has a great editing environment for Lisp, I'll consider creating another.

2. I hear you on the total newbies forum. I thought about that. Currently, my thinking is that I'd rather drop people off into the deep end with a particular dialect. If your question is about asdf-install or something, ask it in the Common Lisp forum. If you're really such a complete newbie that you don't even know where your question goes, that's one reason for The Lounge.

3. On Apache rewrites, yea, I hear you there. I was going to do some looking into that. Honestly, I don't get too much heartburn with various parameters since they have to be in there anyway, but there are some SEO-friendly things that happen with nice URLs that would help the bots to better index the site for global searching as the content builds up.

4. The implementation-specific subforums are a compromise. I'm pretty sure we'll whittle them down. What I didn't want to have happen was the dialect forums get a constant stream of implementation-specific questions. This wouldn't be a concern if we were building Ruby Forum or Perl Forum or Python Forum, where you have a single-implementation language (by and large, I know about Jython, Iron Ruby, etc.). So for instance, I created the SBCL forum with the hope that people who really wanted to discuss SBCL implementation issues, and nothing but SBCL implementation issues would have a place to do that without forcing everybody else interested in other implementations to wade through the content. But it's definitely a compromise.

findinglisp wrote:1. Other editors I'll think about. I'm not trying to give anybody and everybody a place to ask editor questions, however. The main goal for the Emacs and VI forums is to collect the various questions about SLIME and Limp. If your editor has a great editing environment for Lisp, I'll consider creating another.

... while I much prefer people to get in touch with the author (me) of Limp by posting to the forums/mailing lists (Google Groups) you get to by following the links at the very top of the documentation at http://mikael.jansson.be/hacking/limp/docs/ ...